Freespire 1.0 Released

Three weeks ahead of schedule, version 1.0 of Freespire, the no-cost community version of Linspire, is now available from the project’s website. You can download a completely open source version, or a version that includes various proprietary codecs and drivers for an improved out-the-box experience. Screenshots.

I’m sure this distribution will be fine, and it will pull in some leech-like users that don’t like to spend money on software.

However if the purpose is to attract a community of contributors, then I don’t know what Carmony is smoking these days. Linspire doesn’t have a track record of contributing to OSS, asserting technical leadership in the community, or driving open standards. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to submit bugs, there’s no CVS/SVN source repository (just 2 iso files), and there’s hardly any technical documentation at all. This is a 1.0 release!?

Hello, you can’t just put up a forums and a wiki skeleton and say, “come on in, it’s free!!” Seems rushed would be a huge understatement. Freespire is trying to create life without any carbon, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this won’t work.

No a BUNCH of those are linspire projects. I think the problem is they like to say “heavily involved” like they have 20 developers working on nothing but that.That is one of my complaints with any company – just plain being misleading and trying to put a halo over the horns.:) Linspire should stop tooting it’s own horn, making statements about how others are doing something they consider bad if they want to stop being looked at critically. You know the glass houses thingy.:)

Some of the others on there they contribute to ONLY because they want to improve it for themselves or they think they are paying for a advantage.

I have never seen a dollar amount stated for any of that support. They support the DCC alliance? It is a group of distros getting together sharing work to create a base distro. What does that have to do with much of anything?

The stuff they contribute is often friviolous or redundant kind of stuff. But I do agree they do contribute some, but no reason to make it sound as if they are the contribution kings.:) Of course I guess the OSS edition could also be considered a contribution now. I wonder if that includes the installer as well as other items like artwork?hmmm…

” MozNews: What are your hopes and goals for Composer, now renamed to NVu?

DG: Disclaimer: the following lines represent my personal wishes and hopes, and not Lindows Inc.’s views on Nvu.

I’d like Nvu to become the companion standalone editor to Firefox and Thunderbird. The third and last element missing from the Mozilla Application Suite. I want it to become a good wysiwyg editor that we won’t be afraid to compare to the big players on the market. I want Nvu to be a disruptive innovation* in the HTML editors’ market, reaching success from the low-end market share, the one that the big players don’t want to or can’t address. And don’t forget Nvu is cross-platform…

They have to start somewhere. Track records can change and it has to start somewhere. As I stated earlier I this is the start down the path and I hope they continue. If they are criticisized for honestly trying to do better then I don’t see that as providing motivation to continue. Should we not allow a distro to change and evolve? I don’t see some of that stuff you mention as being that important. They have done more than you give them credit for also and I believe they are honestly working on this as quickly as resources allow.

I do think they have a lot of areas to improve upon but I dont think it is fair to criticise them for starting to do just that.

leech? A leech would have to be a burden, something that drains resources. How would someone taking software that is freely given be a leech? I don’t like to spend money on software – when there are software choices that do not cost money that work for me. What is so wrong with that?

I don’t go out and hand out free soup at the kitchen and then complain when someone actually takes it.

You first say “will be fine” and at the end you say”this won’t work” so which is it?:)

Well, as everyone probably knows by now I do not care for linspire at all or really any commercial distro at all. But I certainly welcome and applaud *spire stepping up to bat and creating a open source edition. It gets me wound up when a distro is only commercial/proprietary, yet the zealot in me is at least placated when they also offer a truly free version.

They also seem to be paying attention to how things are normally done and trying to improve upon that instead of simply doing it a different way because it is easier. Yes, the root thing as well as apt.

Very nice! Yes, it is still a bit old and so forth but if that is improved as quickly as everything has been lately then I have no doubt we will quickly see a cutting edge freespire if not a bleeding edge one.

If they bring the repo/warehouse into more of a standard pool type structure and of course get that synced a bit better with debian then I will be very impressed. I am sure *spire could do great things if they only concentrate on what needs to be improved instead of just trying to cram stuff in, make it look real pretty and create adependency maze.

If they can get synced up with etch right now that would alleviate the staleness, the packages with security flaws, as well as provide a heck of a package pool.

I honestly do not think I will have any complaints if they can manage to do those few things. Yes, they are big steps but important steps that once done they will be on my A list if they can “improve” upon debian instead of simply mixing up and breaking the debian goodness that lies underneath.

*improve upon only in a certain sense – in ways it is impossible to improve upon debian but for some it could be easier and friendlier and that is what I mean by improve.

If you have been around the past week or if you look t my profile and read my comments especially my banter with Mr.Carmony then it will be readily apparent that I am in no way a fan of Linspire but I will give them props for freespire and I will do that to show them that they took a bold step and one that is impressive and while not perfect is a good start.

I’ve got to hand it to the Freespire developers, they’ve got a really nice looking desktop. I think the Firefox and Thunderbird icons are the best I’ve seen. The click-n-run app looks very nice as well. At first glance, it seems it would be a great starter distro for those trying Linux for the first time.

Linspire/Freespire are clearly not intended for people who are serious enough about Linux/OSS to be reading a website like this, so obviously most people here (myself included) won’t see the need for it.

Yes, that is a sore point and one that will hopefully be fixed soon. I am thinking about creating a package or possibly a repo for some ported packages so anyone who wants them can update, hopefully without breakage.

I have updated my OSS edition of freespire to 3.5.0 and that is about as new as I can get without ripping out important parts. As stated, it isn’t perfect or anywhere near it but it is a good step down the proper path IMO.

I’m a bit disappointed about their responsiveness to bug reports. I reported that I’ll need the sky2 ethernet driver in order to conveniently install Freespire (module just needs to be built on any recent vanilla kernel), and it doesn’t seem they have done anything about it (not in the release notes at least). I will try 1.0.13 (downloading now), but if it doesn’t work, it won’t work for me.

It uses a Debian core, has repos listed in /etc/apt/sources.list, and STILL, after three releases, does NOT allow for apt-get dist-upgrade. According to the forum, REAL SOON NOW, but still not there. And, while mentioning sources.list, apt-get update (finished checking 160 entries), a sources.list that produces 160 seperate hits?

Yea, another sucky point! There are plenty of them – don’t get me wrong. Yes the pool/repo/warehouse is a convoluted mess and I hope it gets cleaned up. I don’t know if somehow CNR requires this much seperation or if they are mixing packages like crazy and that is the reason for the many entries but it is a mess.

Backports seems to work fairly well with freespire OSS edition, if you are careful enough.

As I stated before, their idea of “real soon” usually leaves a lot to be desired but sometimes they have a surprise.

That is one of my problems with Linspire. But they have every right to do the things they do because the license allows it and cannot be leeches because they have that right. That being said, it is not the right thing to do usually and as such I think they should think more about assisting projects to develop and less about taking those projects and turning it into “their” project.

That is a tough issue that Linspire probably receives too much flack over yet probably does deserve some of it IMO. Especially when they hold up their own project and say “see we contribute a lot to open source”

But as stated earlier, hopefully this is the start down a path of understanding for them and doing things differently. But we must be accepting of this and welcome them not berating them for what they have done. I am not saying everything they have ever done is wrong, simply that they need to consider the community and the impression more and think less about their bottom line.

I think! But I of course could be really wrong on both sides of the issue.